December 9, 2022

Since I’m going to be criticizing a now widely accepted phenomenon, this piece may evoke eyerolls from some supporters. So be it, because certain things need to be said.

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I must confess that with the way many of my fellow adults behave today, it can make me ashamed to be one. I almost sometimes feel as if I want to apologize to the children for the example the contemporary grown-up world now sets. We often lament, and rightly so, how disrespectful many modern youths are, yet a prerequisite for commanding respect is being respectable. There is little respectable about modern American culture.

Whether or not communist activist Willi Münzenberg (1889-1940) actually said: “We will make the West so corrupt that it stinks,” he might as well have. It’s not just that adults now show children indecent images in sex education’s name, rubber stamp elementary school Satan clubs in deference to “religious freedom” and tell kids they can switch sexes just by willing it. It’s also what the “good” people fighting these abominations often do.

On November 14, the Keller Independent School District (KISD), in Texas, prohibited its school libraries from carrying books containing references to “gender fluidity”; of course, they never should’ve been there in the first place because people don’t have “gender” (words do) and sex isn’t fluid. But here’s what is permitted, among other things, under the KISD’s “more virtuous” revised policy:

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“Minimal profanity is allowed in elementary and intermediate schools, middle schools are allowed some, while high schools are allowed…[common] profanity in its library material,” as the Daily Dot puts it.

Seriously? “Minimal profanity” for grade-school kids? How about minimal teacher groping, minimal dispensing of heroin needles, and minimal intra-school fight-club bouts with minimal eye gouging?

When I inveighed against profanity years ago, a reader complained, saying, “We’re not all Little Lord Fauntleroys out here.” Cute. (Actually, Little Lord Fauntleroy was a darn good role model). Well, let me say that growing up in the Bronx, I heard it all and used some of it, on occasion, back in my before-time. But more significant than my own appeals is something written by the quintessential American man’s man and Father of our Nation, George Washington. On August 3, 1776 he issued the following order to his troops: 

The General is sorry to be informed that the foolish, and wicked practice, of profane cursing and swearing (a Vice heretofore little known in an American Army) is growing into fashion; he hopes the officers will, by example, as well as influence, endeavour to check it, and that both they, and the men will reflect, that we can have little hopes of the blessing of Heaven on our Arms, if we insult it by our impiety, and folly; added to this, it is a vice so mean and low, without any temptation, that every man of sense, and character, detests and despises it.

Studying Washington’s life, as I have, can make apparent that he was the closest thing we’ve had to a true American superhero; he was a giant of a man, in stature and character. Note, too, that he expected this virtue from his men even during war, the most horrible situation a fellow could find himself in.

Speaking of which, my father was a prisoner of war in Germany, captured in battle, during WWII and the toughest man I ever knew. I never, ever heard him curse except on one or two occasions when he lost his temper (one involved a prank caller who rang incessantly in the wee hours and who cursed at my dad). It was recognized when he was raised — young people take note — that being vulgar was contrary to virtue. As the late Professor Walter E. Williams once put it (I’m paraphrasing), in the 1940s, “the worst lowlife wouldn’t use the kind of language around women and children that’s regularly used today.”

Yet peppering statements with the f-word is now common even among conservatives, who ought to ask themselves what they’re actually conserving and who normalized it. The latter’s answer should give pause: